We Were Illegal: Uncovering a Texas Family's Mythmaking and Migration

An award-winning author's deep exploration of pivotal moments in Texas history through multiple generations of her own family, and a ruthless reexamination of our national and personal myths

Over seven generations, Jessica Goudeau’s family members were church elders, preachers, Sunday school teachers and potluck organizers. Her great-grandfather helped establish a Christian university in Abilene, Texas, which she attended along with her grandparents, parents, siblings, and cousins. Her family's legacy--a word she heard often growing up--was rooted in faithfulness, righteousness, and the hard work that built the great state of Texas. It wasn’t until she began to dig more deeply into the story of the land she lives on today in suburban Austin, that she discovered her family’s far more complicated role in Texas history, from early illegal settlements on Mexican land, bringing slavery to the state, up through the redlining policies her great-grandfather signed into place that have ramifications even now.

Tracking her ancestors' involvement in pivotal moments from before the Texas Revolution to the Civil War to the rise of the Texas Rangers, up through today, We Were Illegal is at once an intimate and character-driven narrative and an insider's revisionist look at a state that prides itself on its history. It is an act of reckoning and recovery on a personal scale, as well as a reflection of the work we must do as a nation to dismantle the whitewashed narratives that are passed down through families, communities, and textbooks. It is only through facing these hypocrisies and long-buried histories that we will be able to move past this fractured time in our country, take accountability for our legacy, and learn to be better, more honest ancestors.